Flashy Memory Likely To Displace Hard Drives

Everybody is talking about computers of the future that will be lacking some basic parts found on today`s PCs. Depending on which futurologist you listen to, tomorrow`s computer will come without: 1) an electric cord

(replaced by lifetime batteries or solar power); 2) a keyboard (replaced by pen or voice input); or 3) a display screen (replaced by a holographic display projected into the air in front of your eyes).

All those familiar pieces may indeed disappear over time. But long before any of them is gone, another common part will become obsolete, probably within five years or so. Folks, say goodbye to your hard disk drive.

The hard drive, the chief data and program storage unit of small computers today, is an endangered species. Technology-most of it American-has found an alternative storage system that is faster, smaller, lighter and much more power efficient. This new innovation is called flash memory.

A hard disk is found in virtually every desktop and laptop PC on the market today, but that`s a fairly recent phenomenon. We can remember, as recently as four years ago, earnest letters from readers asking whether they should make the big investment to put a hard drive in their PC. Today, nobody even bothers to ask.

Hard drives are fast and reliable, but they have some serious shortcomings when used in laptop computers, the fastest-growing segment of the PC market. The hard disk in your laptop is heavy, susceptible to damage and power hungry. Turning on the drive is one of the fastest ways to use up battery power.

For a long time, computer designers have known of a terrific alternative memory device, the memory chip. This is a sliver of silicon that stores words, pictures, numbers and program instructions in the form of digital impulses. The most common form is the RAM, or random-access memory, chip; these are the black rectangles lined up row after row on your PC`s mother board or memory board.

RAM chips are cheap, fast and highly accurate, but they have one big problem. They are volatile, which means they only hold information as long as the power is on. When the switch is off, these memory chips forget everything. That is why computers today need a disk drive, to receive information from the RAM chips and hold it while the power is off.

There has long been a non-volatile form of memory chip as well, the ROM, or read-only memory, chip. ROM chips never forget, which is a plus, but it is hard to write information to them (thus ``read-only``).

The flash memory chip combines the best of both forms. It is a fast memory chip on which you can write data. But unlike RAM chips, it holds the information even when the power is turned off. A single flash card, a two-inch, half-ounce piece of plastic with an array of flash chips, can hold as much information as a 20-megabyte hard disk, which is much bigger and heavier. Flash memory was invented in Japan by engineers at Toshiba in 1986. But from that point on, this becomes a story Americans should be proud of. The U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp. improved on Toshiba`s design and production methods, cut prices, and now controls 85 percent of a booming world market-a market that has quadrupled every year since 1987.

Intel has made flash memory so cheap that it can now actively target the mass storage, or disk drive, market-at least in small portable computers, where the benefits of small size, weight and power consumption are most valuable.

You probably haven`t realized it, but if you bought a new laptop recently, it probably has slots for flash memory cards already in place on the mother board. By the second half of this year, Intel and Connor Peripherals, the big disk-drive maker, will be marketing a 20-megabyte flash memory pack as a replacement for the hard disk on laptop computers.

For the user, the only noticeable change will be faster response. DOS will be adjusted to treat the flash-memory unit just as if it were a disk drive.

Still, disk drives today are much cheaper; Electronic Engineering Times estimated that hard disk drives cost computer firms about $2 per megabyte. Flash memory is in the range of $50 per megabyte.

But flash prices are dropping so fast they could compete economically with hard drives by the middle of the decade. If that happens, given the flash memory`s clear advantages, every buyer will choose the flash product rather than lugging around a slow hard drive. That`s why Connor and several other hard drive makers are now clamoring to get aboard the Flash express by forming joint ventures with chip firms.